


Unflattering

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-13
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2019-08-22 22:33:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16606673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: Frank remembers the fights he had with Maria.





	Unflattering

Frank remembers the fights he had with Maria.

He pretends not to. It feels like a mar on her memory, to remember her red-faced and screaming, to remember her turning on the stairs and hissing one last dig. 

Everyone said things they didn’t mean. Everyone tried to make an island of themself when they were in pain. It was natural, reflexive, just like breathing. You got upset, and you stopped thinking. Said whatever unkind thing came to mind that would do the job of hurting the person who’d caused the upset in the first place. 

Frank doesn’t remember everything Maria said, every cruel and cutting word she’d ever lobbed at him. He wishes he did. He wishes he could remember her words better, in any conversation. He’d said once that he’d cut his arm off for another evening with her, and he would, he would. He’d cut himself into as many pieces as was asked, if he could get her back, whole and sound and healthy. 

And she could hate him, oh she could tear him apart. She could take him down to bare bones, Maria could, and Frank would take it. When Maria got mad, when Frank really got under her skin, Maria could disassemble Frank quicker than any soldier breaking down their weapon. 

He wants, very badly, to remember Maria for the kindness she brought to his life, the sweetness. He wants to remember her soft words, her delights, her sighs and gasps and her tenderness. Her strengths, too, her innate understanding of what looked good and what didn’t. How she laughed at stupid puns, the way she’d go tight-lipped and narrow eyed when Bill made some crass observation and Frank laughed, before all at once she was laughing too.

He wants to remember only good things about his wife, his beautiful, sweet bride. He wants to do her memory the honor it deserves, to keep alive in him the memory of her at her kindest, her happiest, her most at peace. 

Most of the time, he manages. Hell, at his weakest, at his most broken and hurt, it’s Maria that comes to him, idealized and soft, gently backlit with hands so soft there could be no pain from them ever. 

It’s Maria, wearing the dress she’d died in, frightened and terrified, who comes and takes his hand as he’s dying, as he slips closer and closer to her side, who asks him to come home with her. And it’s Maria, smiling in gentle acceptance, who lets him pull away, gives him his breath back, lets him come gasping back to life under Lieberman’s hands.

These are images of her that hurt, but they hurt less than remembering all the ways they’d known how to hurt each other. The way Maria could reach inside him and clutch his heart, rip him apart in these intimate ways that left them both shaking, both aching. 

Frank remembers the fights he had with Maria, and he hates himself for clinging to these memories of her pain, her violent flashes of anger. But in those memories there was something else he had missed, a connection that he simply would never have again. 

Maria had known how to cut him deeper than anyone else, because he’d never opened himself to anyone the way he opened to her. No one had known him, before or since, the way Maria had known him. It was a connection that he desperately missed, that he could never build with anyone again. 

Frank wants to remember Maria in the most flattering light possible. He wants to crystalize in his mind this image of her as the good that is now gone from the world. 

But sometimes it’s the Maria who saw all the weak points in him and dug her fingers in, who know exactly how to hurt him the worst and would when she had a point to make; it’s the Maria who yelled until she was red in the face and never backed down when he shouted back, who always got the last word, who never took shit and always managed to shut him up; it’s the angry Maria, Maria ready to leave him -- it’s Maria at her very worst that Frank needs to hear. Someone to tell him, vicious and brooking no argument, to get his shit together and get moving. Someone who loved him enough to see all the ways they should hate him.

Frank remembers the fights he had with Maria. They hurt him, those memories, but they’re required to remember Maria as a real person. They’re ugly and they’re painful, but they are necessary. 

He needs them.


End file.
